One of the targets in the SAR, according to Snowden, was Chinese University and public officials, businesses and students in the city. The documents also point to hacking activity by the NSA against mainland targets.

Snowden believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland.

“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.

China is back to work after a three day holiday and the media is on the Snowden case. His claims of NSA hacking China are getting top billing on the big Chinese news portals (Netease for example: 美“监控门”揭秘者:美长期入侵中国网络_网易新闻中心) this morning, as expected.

The massive US global surveillance program revealed by a former CIA whistle-blower in Hong Kong is certain to stain Washington’s overseas image and test developing Sino-US ties, analysts said.

Li Haidong, a researcher of American studies at China Foreign Affairs University, said the United States is now stuck in the awkward position of having to explain itself to its citizens and the world following the exposure of Washington’s vast Internet snooping program.

“For months, Washington has been accusing China of cyberespionage, but it turns out that the biggest threat to the pursuit of individual freedom and privacy in the US is the unbridled power of the government,”Li said.

And there is this cartoon in the China Daily, with the shadow of the Statue of Liberty holding several eavesdropping devices.It’s Christmas in June for Beijing, and Edward Snowden is Santa Claus.

China and Russia are buying increasingly powerful surveillance technologies to intercept communications and try to take control of the Internet, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.

Alec Ross, the U.S. secretary of state’s senior adviser for innovation, said new players such as Thailand and Ukraine would determine the future shape of the Internet by deciding whether to open up globally or operate more closed national “Intranets”…

The Obama administration is committed to defending Internet freedom, a “pillar of America’s foreign policy priorities” which led it to reject the global treaty last year, Ross said.

The attempt to establish a worldwide policy for oversight of the Internet collapsed in Dubai in December after many Western countries said a compromise plan gave too much power to United Nations and other officials.

The United States and allies fought to keep the mandate of the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency, from extending to oversight of the Internet, fearing it could lead to increased censorship and a dramatic reduction in anonymity.

Mr. Ross was likely unaware of NSA activities, but given what Mr. Snowden is revealing the State Department should probably ease off on the Internet freedom rhetoric for a while.

We should expect renewed calls from the PRC and Russia, among many other nations, for a global Internet oversight policy, as well as increased efforts by countries with the required resources, like Russia and China, to build “safer” Internets for their countries.

There is no shortage of irony, given that last year Beijing had to assume the former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun told the US all sorts of political secrets when he fled into the US consulate in Chengdu.

Some consider Snowden a traitor, some consider him a hero. But if he really wanted to go to Iceland, why did he go to the PRC first?

Building a Better Housing Market – Caixin Despite government efforts to cool the property market, land sales in China have surged for the first five months of the year, setting record prices. More worryingly, state-owned enterprises were once again in the thick of the action, despite an order from the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) to back off…An exit of state-owned enterprises from commercial housing market will boost the government’s credibility. And by taking on the national project of building affordable homes, particularly needed in the major cities, state-owned developers will be fulfilling its public mission. This is the good news China needs.//The original Chinese of Hu Shuli’s editorial【舒立观察】“住有所居”与国企功能_杂志频道_财新网…good luck with this idea, huge resistance from SOEs

In summit with Obama, Xi declares Senkakus China’s ‘core interest’ – AJW by The Asahi Shimbun After the June 7-8 summit near Palm Springs in California, Chinese officials explained that Xi told Obama that China will firmly defend its sovereignty and territory in reference to the uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. Japanese officials, however, learned that Xi actually used “core interest,” a key phrase China employs in referring to sovereignty issues concerning Taiwan and Tibet. Washington briefed Tokyo on the contents of the talks.

Related:人民日报-典型的“人格分裂” ——揭开安倍政权“价值观外交”虚伪面纱（上） 钟 声 Some harsh words in People’s Daily by Zhong Sheng about Abe and his “values-based diplomacy”..looks like the first of two pieces, next one friday? // 安倍政权在历史问题上所表现出的对战前军国主义价值的向往与依恋，与其在国际上高调奢谈“共同价值”形成鲜明反差，呈现出典型的“人格分裂”。安倍政权的倒行逆施从一个侧面表明，日本时至今日仍有那么一股势力企图重温历史旧梦，否定二战结果，挑战战后和平秩序。而且，这股势力存在日益坐大成势的现实危险。对照安倍政权的所作所为，人们有理由对它奢谈民主、自由、人权的资格和动机打上巨大的问号。显而易见，其所谓“价值观外交”只不过是欺世盗名的政治把戏，是对国际社会和民主、自由、人权的莫大愚弄。

[视频]“绝户网”严重破坏渔业资源_新闻频道_央视网CCTV Evening News on overfishing, use of nets that catch everything, destroy fishing stocks..hard to fulfill the Chinese Dream when there will be nothing left for future generations // 央视网消息（新闻联播）：再来关注一种叫“绝户网”的捕鱼工具。“绝户网”，顾名思义，指的是会让鱼虾“断子绝孙”的小网眼渔网，随着海水退潮，不管大鱼小鱼都会被网拦住，所以这种捕捞方式会严重破坏海洋渔业资源。但是本台记者在黄海、渤海的部分近海调查时发现，用“绝户网”非法捕捞的行为已经呈现出泛滥的态势。//Commentary following the report [视频]编后语：让“绝户网”绝户_新闻频道_央视网

Related:Confusing numbers on ambient air quality compliance in china « livefrombeijing A few days ago, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection released their annual State of the Environment report. I was struck in particular by the following statistic: the air quality in 88.5% of China’s 113 “key environmental protection cities” meets China’s air quality standard. Sounds pretty good, right? Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this number.

China conducts soil pollution survey – Xinhua | English.news.cn The government plans to conduct a nationwide soil pollution survey, the Ministry of Land and Resources said Wednesday. Soil samples will be collected at multiple depths in order to find both the natural condition of the soil and the impact that human activity has had on it, the ministry said.

Related:The houses built on China’s ‘poisoned’ land | Gao Shengke Wang Kai – China Dialogue Huge areas of contaminated land in Chinese cities like Beijing are being developed into residential districts. But the residents of these developments have no idea….In Beijing, for example, between 2001 and 2005, 142 factories were relocated, displacing 8.78 million square metres of reusable land. According to Li Jingdong, section head of the polluted land management department under the Beijing Bureau of Environmental Protection, from 2004 until now, only a few dozen contaminated sites have been identified, out of which only eight have been remediated.// much of Beijing CBD built on reclaimed factory land…

Related:Danger Maps Backed by Alibaba Pinpoint Chinese Pollution – Bloomberg Danger Maps, a website Liu started last year, allows people to look up sites such as toxic-waste treatment facilities, oil refineries and power plants. Liu has plotted about 6,000 pollution sources based on government data and user input on Baidu Map, China’s equivalent of Google Maps…Danger Maps in January received a donation of 50,000 yuan ($8,150) and an offer of technical support from the Alibaba Foundation, which supports groups working to preserve China’s environment. The foundation was started in 2011 by Alibaba Group, the country’s biggest e-commerce company, with initial funding of 50 million yuan.

China PBOC Suspends Open Market Ops To Ease Liquidity Crunch | MNI The People’s Bank of China suspended open market operations this holiday-shortened trading week in an effort to allow more funds to flow into the interbank system and ease a liquidity crunch. The PBOC suspended its sale of three-month paper on Thursday and refrained from draining any funds via repo transactions, allowing the CNY92 billion in outstanding paper that matured this week to flow back into the system.

观察站：习近平的七大智囊_中国_多维新闻网Duowei on Xi Jinping’s brain trust, says Wang Huning may be leaving Xi’s side…but that even if Wang leaves Xi’s brain trust” he will still be an important advisor//【多维新闻】对于这次习近平访美，外界除了对习近平与其夫人彭丽媛进行关注之外，美国媒体还把聚光灯聚焦在此番陪同习近平出访的中央政策研究室主任王沪宁身上。《华尔街日报》6月5日发表题为《王沪宁：学者出身的中共高级幕僚》的文章对王沪宁进行剖析，将其形容为“中国新保守主义教父”。而在过去几天习近平访问拉美和加勒比海国家时，王沪宁也紧密跟随在他的身旁…但是从目前情况来看，也许不像美国媒体分析的那样，虽然辅佐过江泽民、胡锦涛两任总书记，但是在今天，恰恰是王沪宁最有可能离开习近平，不再成为其智囊团队的一员。

China Leads Non-OECD Economies’ Oil Use to Top OECD – Bloomberg OECD members will use 45.5 million barrels of oil this year, compared with 44.5 million from emerging markets, the EIA forecast. In 2014, demand from the developing economies will rise to 45.9 million barrels a day, while OECD consumption will drop to 45.3 million, according to the estimates from the EIA. China’s consumption will rise to 11.1 million barrels a day next year, up 4 percent from this year’s 10.7 million, the EIA said

Will Bond Market Tidying Trigger Clean Sweep? – CaixinChina’s financial regulators are rewriting rules for the interbank bond market after criminal investigations early this year led to the arrests of several well-known bond traders and exposed serious flaws in the market’s supervision system. The changes affect several agencies and more than a dozen market areas, from the trader account application process, to bond issues and settlements. Rules governing bond trader and supervisor qualifications are also being tightened.

With Capacity to the Gills, How Will This Play Out? – China Real Time Report – WSJ When trade tempers flare it is easy to lose sight of the core provocateur. There’s simply too much capacity. Massive investment in new car plants–by both foreign joint ventures and Chinese companies – has been based on the key assumption that China’s economy would continue to expand at high rates of growth. That’s no longer the case–and the pain is just starting to register.

The Chinese Debate on Constitutionalism: Texts and Analyses (II) | China Copyright and Media Over the last week, I have selected and translated a number of texts relating to the constitutionalism debate, which I will analyse further in depth in the following posts of this series, as I did with Yang Xiaoqing’s article on constitutional governance. I have, however, already uploaded the translations of the articles themselves, as they seem to be quite topical.

Man Details Risks in Exposing China’s Forced Labor – NYTimes.com Last month, though, during an interview to discuss China’s labor camps, a 47-year-old former inmate at the Masanjia camp said he was the letter’s author. The man, a Beijing resident and adherent of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual practice, said it was one of 20 such letters he secretly wrote over the course of two years. He then stashed them inside products whose English-language packaging, he said, made it likely they were destined for the West.

Bilateral talks are way forward for South China Sea – FT.com Letters Sir, Your newspaper carried on May 30 an article by David Pilling entitled “Rash or plucky, the Philippines is right to challenge China” (Comment, May 30). I find this article unacceptable. The essence of the South China Sea issue is disputes over territorial sovereignty caused by the illegal occupation of China’s Nansha Islands by some littoral countries and overlapping claims to some waters in the South China Sea.–He Rulong, Spokesman, Chinese Embassy, London, UK

Washington is bullying Hong Kong to extradite me, says Edward Snowden | South China Morning Post He said: “I heard today from a reliable source that the United States government is trying to bully the Hong Kong government into extraditing me before the local government can learn of this [the US National Security Agency hacking people in Hong Kong]. The US government will do anything to prevent me from getting this into the public eye, which is why they are pushing so hard for extradition.”

Japan’s leading appliance retailer getting knocked out of China – AJW by The Asahi Shimbun Tensions over the Senkaku Islands, “obstructive behavior” by rival companies and fierce price wars forced Japan’s leading electric appliance retailer to leave Nanjing only a year after opening a retail shop there. Yamada Denki Co. had planned to use its store in the southern Chinese city as a starting point to advance into nearby Shanghai, one of the country’s largest cities.

The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition):- N.Korea Severs Hotline Again North Korea on Wednesday cut off an inter-Korean hotline at the truce village of Panmunjom again, only days after reconnecting it last week. A day earlier the North abruptly cancelled cross-border talks scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday on a flimsy pretext. A Unification Ministry official on Wednesday said a liaison officer made a test call through the Panmunjom hotline around 9 a.m., but there was no answer from the North. The same thing happened at 4 p.m.

A smarter way to deal with China – latimes.com–Joseph Nye World politics today is different from that of the last two centuries. It is now like a three-dimensional chess game in which interstate military power is highly concentrated in the United States, interstate economic power is distributed in a multipolar manner and power over transnational issues such as climate change, terrorism and pandemics is highly diffused. The structure of power is not unipolar, multipolar or chaotic; it is all three at the same time. Thus, a smart strategy must handle different distributions of power in different domains and understand the trade-offs among them. It makes no more sense to see the world through a purely realist lens — that focuses only on the top chessboard and predicts conflict with China — than it does to see through a liberal lens that looks primarily at a single board and predicts only cooperation

Philippines Vows to Defend Territory, Sovereignty – ABC News Philippine President Benigno Aquino III vowed Wednesday his country will not back down from any challenge to its sovereignty and territory amid a sea dispute with China. He said in a speech marking the 115th anniversary of the country’s independence from Spain that the Philippines has not claimed territory that clearly belongs to another country but only asks that “our territory, rights and dignity be respected.”

Officials Across Asia Suspect NSA Is Intercepting Their Emails – Business Insider Government and security officials in parts of Asia have been sending sensitive information and policy documents via e-mail services offered by U.S. web giants, and concerns are spreading that these may have been monitored and collected by the National Security Agency (NSA). The official name cards of several directors at Indonesia’s ministry of foreign affairs, for example, give only Yahoo or Gmail addresses, services provided by Yahoo Inc and Google Inc. One researcher who deals regularly with Indonesian security and police officials said all of them used Gmail or Yahoo to communicate often sensitive information.

KMT officials begin three-day visit to mainland|Politics|chinadaily.com.cn A delegation led by Honorary Kuomintang Chairman Wu Po-hsiung arrived in Beijing on Wednesday for a three-day visit, a development that mainland authorities called “an important activity” among the high-level exchanges between the mainland and Taiwan. Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, is scheduled to meet with the delegation on Thursday afternoon.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Pledges Property Curbs to Stay – Bloomberg Hong Kong, the world’s most expensive home market, will not ease its real-estate curbs until there’s a steady supply of new properties as the government seeks to address concerns that it favors developers. Earlier actions have brought down prices and rents, and the government can do more if needed, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, 58, said in an interview in New York.

腾讯拟打造安全产业链阻击360 “3Q大战”第二季山雨欲来 | 每经网Tencent to launch security service for Wechat, way for Tencent to take mobile security share from Qihoo?// 核心提示： 昨日，腾讯公司副总裁丁珂表示，将在微信新版本5.0中推出专门保护微信以及微信支付功能安全的“微信保镖”。

A Look at ChinaCache’s China Internet Report for Q1 2013ChinaCache’s recently released China Internet Report for the Q1 2013 provides plenty of graphs to back up my claim that Internet performance varies from time of day, from region-to-region, and from carrier-to-carrier. This 34-page report is crammed-packed with goodies for those so inclined to take a look.

More Big Media Deals Between Chinese Companies and U.S. Expected | The Wrap Media Chinese companies will look to acquire major U.S. media and technology companies in the coming years while the United States will resign itself to smaller deals and joint ventures, according to a new study released on Tuesday by law firm Manatt, Phelps and Phillips. Entertainment and media deal making between the two countries has accelerated in recent years, with more than $20 billion in acquisitions in 2012.

India, China, and the Map to Two Billion Connected Devices Flurry measured a 47% increase in active smartphones and tablets in the United States between April of 2012 and April of 2013. While that number sounds impressive, it actually puts the U.S. in the bottom 5% of countries for connected device growth in the past year. Worldwide, growth of these devices is exploding. To be in the top 5% of countries for growth over the past year, a country’s number of active connected devices needed to more than triple.

SOCIETY, ART, SPORTS, CULTURE AND HISTORY

Tea Leaf Nation Awarded Competitive Grant From Harvard Law School congrats. $80k/yr? // The Tea Leaf Nation team is proud to announce that TLN has been awarded a grant from Harvard Law School. As part of the inaugural class of seed grant recipients from the law schools Public Service Venture Fund, Tea Leaf Nation will receive both funding and advisory support from the innovative program, the first of its kind at any law school.

FOOD AND TRAVEL

Dressed-Down Italian at Opera Bombana in Beijing – Scene Asia – WSJ Umberto Bombana’s Hong Kong restaurant 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo is the only Italian restaurant outside of Italy to win three Michelin stars, and the chef has recently expanded into mainland China, opening a second branch of 8 1/2 in Shanghai last year and Opera Bombana in the capital in May. Mr. Bombana’s Beijing venture is the dressed-down answer to his restaurants in Hong Kong and Shanghai. “Here, they want something that is not so formal,” said executive chef Marino D’Antonio. //In the Parkview Green mall, across from Din Taifung..some jetsetting Beijing foodie friends who have eaten there were unimpresssed…

China’s MA60 airliner suffers safety scares | The Japan Times China’s high-flying aviation ambitions suffered a setback Tuesday as Myanmar grounded several planes made by the Asian powerhouse and Indonesia ordered special checks on its fleet following a series of safety scares. An MA60 turboprop airliner with 52 people on board crash-landed at an airport in eastern Indonesia on Monday, leaving two passengers with minor injuries and forcing state-owned carrier Merpati to write off the plane. On the same day, an MA60 operated by Myanma Airways and carrying about 60 people skidded off a runway at an airport in southern Myanmar. Nobody was hurt.